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California Hard Core

Abstract

California Hard Core is a narrative history of the pornographic film industry in California from 1967 to 1978, a moment when Americans openly made, displayed, and watched sexually explicit films. Two interrelated questions animate this project: Who moved the pornographic film from the margins of society to the mainstream of American film culture? What do their stories tell us about sex and sexuality in the U.S. in the last third of the twentieth century?

The earlier academic literature concentrates on pornographic film and political debates surrounding it rather than industry participants and their contexts. The popular literature, meanwhile, is composed almost entirely of book-length oral histories and autobiographies of filmmakers and models. California Hard Core helps to close the divide between these two literatures by documenting not only an eye-level view of work from behind the camera, on the set, and in the movie theater, but also the ways in which consumers received pornographic films, placing the reader in the viewing position of audience members, police officers, lawyers, judges, and anti-pornography activists.

I argue that in the late 1960s a small group of sexual entrepreneurs, motivated by profit and inspired by the sexual revolution, moved pornographic film from the illicit to the mainstream of American film culture. Hard core film put sex on display, both reflecting and advancing the central tenet of the sexual revolution, which sought to increase the visibility of sex above all else. This movement, however, was mediated by a give and take relationship with the state, a relationship that, in turn, rendered pornographic films relatively tame in comparison to the sexual fluidity that marked the personal and professional lives of industry participants. Their stories demonstrate that when it came to sexual behavior, the sexual revolution was more easily lived in the private realm than the public sphere because the state seemed to have far less influence in private spaces. Paradoxically, however, it was in those private spaces that the state ultimately had the most control over sexual behavior because the individual was unaware of its quiet internalizing, regulatory presence.

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